Trump opens door to new sanctions for election interference

President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order for new sanctions for people and companies found to be interfering in U.S. elections — though it's unlikely to satisfy congressional demands for mandatory punishment of adversaries like Russia.

“It’s a further effort, among several that the administration has made, to protect the United States against foreign interference in our elections and really our political process more broadly,” national security adviser John Bolton told reporters.

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Under the order, the intelligence community will have 45 days after each election to assess whether any foreign meddling occurred. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence will then send its assessment to the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department, which will have 45 more days to determine whether the sanctions described in Trump’s order should be imposed. The Treasury and State Departments can also impose penalties beyond those sanctions.

The order’s definition of election interference includes social media influence operations, the release of hacked political documents and attempts to breach election systems like voter registration databases — all of which Russia carried out during the 2016 presidential race, U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials have said.

The order is the latest element of the Trump administration’s concerted effort to appear serious about combating digital meddling, even as Trump himself continues to muddy the waters about the nature of Moscow’s involvement in the 2016 campaign.

“We felt it was important to demonstrate the president has taken command of this issue — that it’s something he cares deeply about,” Bolton said.

Late last year, the FBI established a Foreign Influence Task Force to centralize its investigations of cyber intrusions and influence campaigns aimed at elections. In August, DHS and ODNI held the first election security tabletop exercise to test working relationships with federal, state and local partners. And DHS has held several briefings for reporters to outline its election security work.

In early August, amid doubts about the president’s commitment to the issue, the White House took the unusual step of publicizing Trump’s participation in two National Security Council meetings focused on election security.

“We are taking nothing for granted here,” Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told reporters. “We have significantly improved our ability to be able to warn state and local officials and federal officials as to what we see and what steps we can take prior to the election, in addition to what we will be doing here [with sanctions] after the election.”

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And while Russia’s meddling has dominated the news, Coats indicated that China, Iran and North Korea also are trying to disrupt U.S. elections.

“We see attempts,” he said. “We’re monitoring it very, very closely. It’s just an ongoing process. What we see is the capability and attempts. … We continue to analyze all that.”

The need for Trump’s new directive remains unclear. In late 2016, as part of his administration’s response to Russia’s hacking campaign, former President Barack Obama amended his own cybersecurity-related sanctions directive to cover election interference.

The White House did not respond to an email asking why Trump signed a new executive order instead of using Obama's directive. Bolton told reporters that the new order “sets up the framework within which these decisions on sanctions can be made for election interference.”

e White House did not respond to an email asking why Trump signed a new executive order instead of using Obama’s directive.

Trump’s order appeared to be an effort to head off more aggressive measures in Congress. Reuters reported Tuesday that “the administration wants to preempt legislation being considered in the House and Senate that addresses similar issues.”

A Senate bill known as the DETER Act, S. 2313 (115), from Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), would require the president to sanction Russian actors that ODNI determines “engaged in interference in a United States election.” But crucially, it would prevent the president from suspending or eliminating those sanctions unless ODNI reported to Congress that the Kremlin had not interfered in a U.S. election for “at least 2 presidential election cycles.”

In a statement, Rubio and Van Hollen said that the new executive order “recognizes the threat, but does not go far enough to address it.”

“Mandatory sanctions on anyone who attacks our electoral systems serve as the best deterrent, which is the central tenet of the bipartisan DETER Act,” they said. “We must make sure Vladimir Putin’s Russia, or any other foreign actor, understands that we will respond decisively and impose punishing consequences against those who interfere in our democracy.”

Bolton declined to comment on the senators’ criticism but said the president had “broad discretion in this area.”

“We think it’s critical for the effective conduct of American foreign and defense policy to be able to be flexible,” he said, “not to be bound by decisions that may seem like a good idea at the time but six months later don’t work effectively.”

White House officials reached out to Rubio’s office last week to discuss Trump’s executive order and to stress that it was “informed and influenced” by the DETER Act, according to a source with knowledge of the matter. The source, who requested anonymity to discuss confidential conversations, called the White House’s assurances “a good sign.”

Van Hollen’s office also had “extensive conversations with the administration” about the legislation, according to a Van Hollen staffer.

Bolton said he discussed the order with “more than two dozen members of Congress” in the past several weeks, adding, “We’re perfectly prepared to speak with members of Congress who have proposed legislation [and] have other ideas.”

“President Trump is committed to protecting our nation’s elections from foreign interference and has made it clear that his administration will not tolerate foreign interference in our elections from any nation state or other malicious actor,” Garrett Marquis, a National Security Council spokesman, told POLITICO on Wednesday when asked about the executive order.